Re: <nettime> Weekly Standard: Shirkyism

[David Golumbia <dgolumbia@gmail.com>]

i really appreciated this, too, and as a dedicated, technology-aware
member of the "opposition," i find that Zizek is right and that in
general our political mind now wants only two positions: tea party
(where technology is not a topic we talk about except as part of
capital's beneficence) and techno-liberalism (where digital technology
is the only thing that can save us). the fact that tea party has used
"new media" throughout its explicitly fascist assault on the last 100
years of social progress seems to constantly escape the likes of mr
shirky. power is power. the fact that its computational doesn't make
it good.

i heard him on npr lately, and apparently in researching for his
recent book mr shirky discovered that the "print revolution" to which
he often compares "the digital revolution" was not a single thing,
had many parts, and had people as actors using print for a variety of
goals, not simply the creation of democracy.

and who has been/is writing from a position of knowing nothing?



On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 7:21 AM, David Mandl <dmandl@panix.com> wrote:

>
> Good to see a smart person calling Shirky out. Criticism of him (actually a
> ridiculously easy target) is virtually non-existent in the U.S., presumably
> because it makes people look like dinosaurs who "don't get it." (See the
> extreme overreaction to Malcolm Gladwell's recent article about Shirky and
> Twitter. Gladwell's no Walter Benjamin either, but the response to his
> criticism was absolutely hysterical, as in "hysteria.")




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